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Thiesen creates web site of Martyrs Mirror illustrations
Bethel College archivist John D. Thiesen has created a web
site containing scanned versions of all 104 of the Jan Luiken
illustrations from the 1685 edition of the Martyrs Mirror. The
site is available at http://www.bethelks.edu/services/mla/images/martyrsmirror.
"The Martyrs Mirror is one of the classics of Mennonite
literature," says Thiesen who is director of the Mennonite
Library and Archives and co-director of libraries at Bethel College.
"The 104 illustrations in the 1685 Dutch edition are well
known. One of the most familiar is the image of Dirk Willems
rescuing his pursuer from an icy waterway. The Dirk Willems image
(see book 2, p. 387) has become a Mennonite icon in the last
several decades."
Thiesen explains that until now, in the midst of rapidly growing
collections of on-line reference information, there has not been
a web site showing all of the illustrations together. This new
site includes a full-screen view of each illustration with a
brief caption.
The site is intended as a reference and as a way to get an
overview of the whole set of illustrations together. The scans
were made from an original 1685 edition and show some of the
variations and anomalies found in seventeenth-century printing.
So far, however, no one has made available the full text of the
Martyrs Mirror on-line, either in English or the original Dutch.
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